La démocratie en Europe

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Shirin M. Rai, Rachel Johnson

"This collection highlights the ways in which parliaments create and maintain powerful symbols of democracy and power. It explores how political and social hierarchies operate within parliaments through ceremonial spectacles, formal and informal rules and rituals, art and architecture. Members are socialized through everyday practices but such institutional disciplining is also challenged performatively - by refusal to participate, by subversion of norms or by rejection of rules. The contributions to this volume highlight that the everyday ritual practices as well as institutional ceremonies have significant political meaning, whether their focus is upon the spectacular or the quotidian. Chapters on opening ceremony, Prime Minister's Questions, on performance of debate and disruption, on the architecture and space of suggest that what has often been seen as the banal backdrop to politics proper, accumulated tradition or necessary rules of procedure, should in fact be the starting-point for our analyses of modern democratic parliaments"--

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Norton Garfinkle and Daniel Yankelovich

In 'Uniting America', some of the most prominent US social thinkers reject the myth of polarisation, arguing that there are sensible centrist solutions more in keeping with public sentiment and that would better serve the national interest.

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Richard R. Beeman

"In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Richard R. Beeman offers an overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, Beeman reveals an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In doing so, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality." "Political life in eighteenth-century America, Beeman demonstrates, was diffuse and fragmented, with America's British subjects and their leaders often speaking different political dialects altogether. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were under way that were making it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures." As the author shows in a final chapter on the Revolution, those popular pressures, once unleashed, were difficult to contain and drove the colonies slowly and unevenly toward a democratic form of government. Synthesizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Beeman offers an account of the way politics actually worked in this formative time for American political culture."--BOOK JACKET.

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Philip Oldenburg

"The question of why some countries have democratic regimes and others do not is a significant issue in comparative politics. This book looks at India and Pakistan, two countries with clearly contrasting political regime histories, and presents an argument on why India is a democracy and Pakistan is not. Focusing on the specificities and the nuances of each state system, the author examines in detail the balance of authority and power between popular or elected politicians and the state apparatus through substantial historical analysis. India and Pakistan are both large, multi-religious and multi-lingual countries sharing a geographic and historical space that in 1947, when they became independent from British rule, gave them a virtually indistinguishable level of both extreme poverty and inequality. All of those factors militate against democracy, according to most theories, and in Pakistan democracy did indeed fail very quickly after Independence. It has only been restored as a fa ade for military-bureaucratic rule for brief periods since then. In comparison, after almost thirty years of democracy, India had a brush with authoritarian rule, in the 1975-76 Emergency, and some analysts were perversely reassured that the India exception had been erased. But instead, after a momentous election in 1977, democracy has become stronger over the last thirty years."--Pub. desc.